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Evolutionary and Topological Properties of Genes and Community Structures in Human Gene Regulatory Networks.

ABSTRACT: The diverse, specialized genes present in today's lifeforms evolved from a common core of ancient, elementary genes. However, these genes did not evolve individually: gene expression is controlled by a complex network of interactions, and alterations in one gene may drive reciprocal changes in its proteins' binding partners. Like many complex networks, these gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are composed of communities, or clusters of genes with relatively high connectivity. A deep understanding of the relationship between the evolutionary history of single genes and the topological properties of the underlying GRN is integral to evolutionary genetics. Here, we show that the topological properties of an acute myeloid leukemia GRN and a general human GRN are strongly coupled with its genes' evolutionary properties. Slowly evolving ("cold"), old genes tend to interact with each other, as do rapidly evolving ("hot"), young genes. This naturally causes genes to segregate into community structures with relatively homogeneous evolutionary histories. We argue that gene duplication placed old, cold genes and communities at the center of the networks, and young, hot genes and communities at the periphery. We demonstrate this with single-node centrality measures and two new measures of efficiency, the set efficiency and the interset efficiency. We conclude that these methods for studying the relationships between a GRN's community structures and its genes' evolutionary properties provide new perspectives for understanding evolutionary genetics.

SUBMITTER: Szedlak A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4928929 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundHigh throughput gene expression experiments yield large amounts of data that can augment our understanding of disease processes, in addition to classifying samples. Here we present new paradigms of data Separation based on construction of transcriptional regulatory networks for normal and abnormal cells using sequence predictions, literature based data and gene expression studies. We analyzed expression datasets from a number of diseased and normal cells, including different types of acute leukemia, and breast cancer with variable clinical outcome.ResultsWe constructed sample-specific regulatory networks to identify links between transcription factors (TFs) and regulated genes that differentiate between healthy and diseased states. This approach carries the advantage of identifying key transcription factor-gene pairs with differential activity between healthy and diseased states rather than merely using gene expression profiles, thus alluding to processes that may be involved in gene deregulation. We then generalized this approach by studying simultaneous changes in functionality of multiple regulatory links pointing to a regulated gene or emanating from one TF (or changes in gene centrality defined by its in-degree or out-degree measures, respectively). We found that samples can often be separated based on these measures of gene centrality more robustly than using individual links. We examined distributions of distances (the number of links needed to traverse the path between each pair of genes) in the transcriptional networks for gene subsets whose collective expression profiles could best separate each dataset into predefined groups. We found that genes that optimally classify samples are concentrated in neighborhoods in the gene regulatory networks. This suggests that genes that are deregulated in diseased states exhibit a remarkable degree of connectivity.ConclusionTranscription factor-regulated gene links and centrality of genes on transcriptional networks can be used to differentiate between cell types. Transcriptional network blueprints can be used as a basis for further research into gene deregulation in diseased states.

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Evolutionary and Topological Properties of Genes and Community Structures in Human Gene Regulatory Networks.

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